Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Sunday, May 7, 2017

When a new instance of Miranda is created the user(s) need to create a new Certificate Authority (CA). The CA can be self-singed or signed by a recognized authority like Verisign. The CA signs the certificate that a Miranda node is required to present upon joining the cluster.

This authenticates the server to the clients and validates a client wanting to join the cluster.

The clients need the CA's certificate so that when they communicate with the server, to publish a new event for example, they can establish an SSL connection. The other severs need the CA's certificate to verify other sever's certificates when a remote system tries to join the cluster.

The CA's certificate thus has to be added to all the client trustores as well as all the server trustores.

Saturday, May 6, 2017

Events and Deliveries are controlled by remote policies, but creates/updates and deletes of User, Topics and Subscriptions go through a 2 phase commit.

The node that initiated the operation takes on the role of coordinator

During phase 1, nodes agree that a write is OK and prepare to go through with the operation (commit) or abort the operation. If any node signals that they are not ready then the coordinator should abort the operation.

During phase 2 the coordinator tells the rest of the node to either commit or abort. Assuming all the nodes responded that they were ready during phase 1, the coordinator signals that the nodes should commit.

As a concrete example, suppose an admin wants to add a new user to the system. The node that the admin contacts acts as the coordinator. The admin supplies the required information and the system announces it's intention to add the user to the rest of the nodes. In this case, the other nodes check to see if they already have a user with the same name. Assuming they don't they signal that they are ready to add the user. The coordinator issues a commit and the new user is added to the system.

Monday, May 1, 2017

When I decided to split Miranda into two parts, I had to deal with CORS. This is because the pages reside in one origin, but the servlets come from another. It turns out that a servlet needs to implement the HTTP OPTIONS method and return the following headers: